Listen to FOMC, ignore the dots

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Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke was asked about the discrepancy between individual rate forecasts of policymakers, many of whom — represented as dots on a chart — see rates rising in the next couple of years, and the Federal Open Market Committee’s statement that it sees rates staying low until late 2014. Bernanke’s answer was clear: the FOMC is king.

The individual projections are inputs to the committee decision, so the committee decision is the critical element in that respect. The committee was quite comfortable with the consensus that we have reported today.